Although it is one of Turkey’s largest financial institutions with $84 billion in assets, Akbank T.A.Ş.’ye still faces a number of challenges adopting to the digital world. Chief among these is finding a way to grow its customer base by increasing retention and reducing churn.

This challenge is made even more complicated by a younger population in Turkey, where half of the citizens are under the age of 29. “We can say that 80-85 percent of younger people prefer the digital [banking] business rather than the classical ways,” said Attila Bayrak (pictured), chief analytics officer at Akbank. “We are keen on being a leading digital bank in Turkey.”

Bayrak paid a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto studio in California. They discussed ways that Akbank retooled its analytics operation and the importance of being able to measure campaign results in real time. (* Disclosure below.)

Juggling 90 different campaigns

Adapting to the realities of a younger customer base in the digital world required rethinking the bank’s approach to marketing data and analytics. With 90 different marketing campaigns running simultaneously at any given time, it became a challenge to tailor offers and messages at the best time to the right customers.

The bank also had to deal with increased business complexity driven by an influx of new data which needed to be evaluated and managed. “We used to analyze a couple of hundred dimensions and variables,” Bayrak said. “It’s more than 10,000 today.”

Working with Datameer’s enterprise big data platform, Akbank increased data processing time and consolidated analytics into a single suite. “You’re measuring hundreds of marketing actions in a single month,” Bayrak stated. “We can use the output of predictive analytics in a much more efficient way by understanding the results more frequently and speedily.”

The ability to view the results of marketing campaigns on a daily basis and make adjustments on-the-fly was critical to improving retention and reducing churn. Analytic cycle times covering the bank’s numerous marketing campaigns were reduced from five days to five hours, Bayrak explained.

“It gives us some courage to design new use cases,” he said. “We are trying to get everything in real time.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CubeConversations. (* Disclosure: Datameer Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Datameer nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE